As Tony Aiello entered his nineties, he had false teeth, an

artificial hip, and an artificial knee. He gripped a walker to

hoist himself out of bed. Stiff in the back, he had contraptions
to help him pull on his pants and socks, along with a shoehorn
to slide his feet into velcro-strapped shoes. He had hearing
aids and a pacemaker with a defibrillator for his triple-
bypassed heart. He would read recipes in the living room and
forget the ingredients by the time he reached the kitchen.
Arthritis stiffened the fingers that had served him for decades
as a deli butcher, so he cut food with scissors. He took blood
thinners for his congestive heart failure. The slightest nick
while pruning trees in the yard would make him bleed until his
wife, Adele, would, as he put it, “patch me up.” After losing an
inch or so to age, Tony stood 4'11".

Still, Tony would brag, “Nobody believes that I'm 90.” He could
do anything—“a little slower.” Perhaps that was just Tony
being Tony. People who'd known him for decades said he'd
always had “little man syndrome.” But maybe there was
something to the bravado. Neighbors said that not so long
ago, Tony seemed hale—a stocky figure walking down the
sidewalk in a tank top, like a pint-size, sure-stepping Marlon
Brando. He was gutsy too: When he was about 80, he met
Adele Navarra while they were in line at the Save Mart meat
counter and asked her to coffee the same night. He bought
two dozen roses for the occasion.

Both Tony and Adele were widowed, and before long they
married. Adele was two years Tony's senior, but people
marveled at how sharp she was. She moved into Tony's house
in the Berryessa neighborhood of eastern San Jose, California.
By chance, her daughter, Karen, lived just two blocks down
the street. Once, when Adele fell in the yard, a neighbor who
came to her aid noticed that Tony seemed just as doting as
could be as he helped her back into the typical ranch home on
a typical San Jose block where, by all appearances, he'd lived
a rather typical life for the past 50-plus years.

Then, on September 14, 2018, a coroner's investigator came to

the house and broke anguishing news: Adele's daughter,
Karen, had been found dead.
October 2019. Subscribe to WIRED.
PHOTOGRAPH: DAN WINTERS; TYPOGRAPHY: CLAUDIA DE ALMEIDA

Karen was 67 and lived alone with her two cats in a house on
Terra Noble Way. She worked as a pharmacy tech at a San
Jose hospital, and when she didn't show up for work, a
coworker stopped by to check on her. The front door was
unlocked, and, once inside, the coworker found Karen's
corpse in a chair at the dining room table, her legs stretched
out, her head slumped over the chair's back, bloody from bash
wounds that an attorney would later say “destroyed her
identity.” Her right hand clutched a Flint kitchen knife with an
8-inch blade. Her throat was slit, twice.

The investigators who arrived saw no telltale spatter of a

throat-slashing; the slice had happened after she was already
dead. In fact, it looked not only as if the scene had been
staged but ham-handedly so, without a clear idea of the faux
plot. The knife in Karen's hand seemed to suggest suicide, yet
the knocked-over chairs indicated a struggle. Her bedroom
and kitchen drawers were open or on the floor as if ransacked,
but the drawers were neat, their contents intact, with cash,
jewelry, and electronics still in the house, financial documents
on the kitchen table.

The criminal oversights didn't end there. As Karen's body was

unzipped from the body bag and laid out at the morgue, the
coroner took note of a black band still encircling her left wrist:
a Fitbit Alta HR—a smartwatch that tracks heartbeat and
movement. A judge signed a warrant to extract its data, which
seemed to tell the story Karen couldn't: On Saturday,
September 8, five days before she was found, Karen's heart
rate had spiked and then plummeted. By 3:28 in the afternoon,
the Fitbit wasn't registering a heartbeat.
Police also collected video from a neighbor's Ring
surveillance camera that pointed in the direction of Karen's
house. The footage showed that before and after 3:28 pm, a
gray car was parked in her driveway. That afternoon, a Toyota
Corolla of the same color had shuttled over to her house with
fresh-from-the-oven biscotti in a ziplock bag and slices of foil-
wrapped pizza on a paper plate—a surprise treat from the
driver: Karen's 90-year-old stepdad, Tony Aiello.

ILLUSTRATION: LELAND FOSTER

In late January, Tony Aiello was pushed into a Santa Clara
County courtroom in a wheelchair. Watching him cross the
room from the front row was Adele Navarra Aiello, her walker
parked in the aisle beside her. She opened her mouth,
apparently overcome for a second, before collecting herself.
In her nineties, Adele presents an elegant figure with short,
gray hair, gold hoop earrings, pink blush, and a long brown
cardigan. Tony's daughter, Annette Aiello, a 61-year-old with
wavy, black hair and her father's squared-off shoulders, sat
next to her, making notes on a legal pad. She occasionally
showed these to Adele, who otherwise looked directly at Tony
with closed-lip Mona Lisa inscrutability.

Based in large part on the data from the Fitbit and the
neighbors' surveillance camera, Tony had been arrested and
charged with murder. He'd been held for four months in county
jail awaiting trial and wore a red Department of Corrections
shirt, loose civilian khaki pants, hot pink socks, and flip-flops
because the jail couldn't find shoes that fit. His pointy nose
and a frame that nearly matched the dimensions of the
wheelchair lent him an elfin quality.
Waiting for the hearing to start, he shot Adele an air kiss and
massaged his arthritic knuckles one by one. He began to cry,
plucking a tissue out of his chest pocket to blot the tears.
Still, he seemed to try to cheer up his wife, theatrically raising
his handcuffed, clasped hands and twiddling his thumbs in her
direction as if lampooning himself— look at me still doing this,
even here!—and sent Adele another kiss. The third time, she
sent one back.

The hearing, at which the lawyers discussed when Karen's

autopsy report would be finished, did not last long. In the
hallway afterward, a woman in a puffy jacket who'd also been
in the courtroom approached Adele. She introduced herself,
saying she'd worked with Karen decades earlier. She told
Adele she looked marvelous. Adele smiled and said, “I'm 92.”

Old acquaintances and neighbors were abuzz, wondering why

Adele was standing by her husband. (“If you killed one of my
children, you'd have to prove to me you didn't do it,” one told
me.) But if the air kisses hadn't shown it, Adele made it clear
to Karen's former coworker how she felt. “My husband is such
a sweetheart,” she said plaintively. “They got along so well.”

Looking at Adele, the woman warily mused, “That's just

strange. That's very strange.” Adele didn't say it then, but she
believed the murderer was still at large, and no fancy heart-
tracking device was going to change her mind.
Anthony Vincent Aiello was born in Chicago in 1928, one of
seven children. His family moved back to Sicily when he was a
toddler, and after fifth grade he left school and started helping
out in the family's olive oil factory. In his late teens, he heard
murmurs about being drafted into the Italian army. “Within a
week, I was on a boat” back to the US, he said. He served in
the US Army during the Korean War and afterward settled in
San Jose, where his sister lived.

Tony found a job at a Del Monte pickle factory, got married,

and later joined his brother-in-law to run a small grocery store
on a rural road serving the local Italian and Portuguese
farmers. While a family member says he was always a droll
jokester with a “sparkle in his eye,” some people who knew
him said he could be overbearing: “He was superior, and the
boss.” One woman who worked for him as a teenager
remembers thinking he was “creepy.”

The Aiellos had two kids, and by the late 1960s they were able
to buy a home for about $37,000. Sprawl was fast churning
orchards into suburban enclaves like theirs, and after his
grocery was torn down to make way for a bigger road, Tony
opened a deli in a strip mall an eight-minute drive from his
house.

The whole family pitched in, and Tony, dressed in a white

apron, presided over a long display case filled with lasagna-to-
go and deli meats. He would chat with customers under the
hanging mortadella and prosciutto. “He was a scrappy kind of
guy, a don't-mess-with-me kind of guy,” one regular
remembers. Over the years, Tony lost most of his native
Italian and would sprinkle his English, a language he'd only
started speaking as a teenager, with movie-like quips—“You
betcha” and “What's up, doc?” He and his son, Tony Jr.,
started a towing business in the 1980s. “I love to work,” Tony
would later tell interrogators. For a hobby, he hunted deer and
boar; the walls of his converted garage were mounted with
taxidermied game heads.

A 10-minute drive from the deli, Adele and Dominic Navarra

lived with their two children, Stephen and Karen, in a ranch
house in a subdivision called Warner Heights. Dominic, too,
had his own business, a pharmacy, where Karen—people
called her Cookie—took prescription orders, her hair pulled
back into a long brown ponytail. She was pleasant, reserved,
“the kind of girl you could tell a secret and she wouldn't tell
anyone,” said Therese Lavoie, who remained friends with
Karen through their twenties. Lavoie said Karen's brother,
Stephen, was the outgoing one—much like their “jovial, larger
than life” dad—while Karen took after Adele. “They were like
the perfect family,” added Lavoie, who sometimes visited the
Navarra home or went for a spin in Karen's sporty Volkswagen
Karmann Ghia. Karen studied science at nearby San Jose
State University for three years, moved into her own
apartment, and became a pharmacy tech at a regional
hospital.

Karen was “the kind of girl you could tell a

secret and she wouldn't tell anyone.”
In the 1970s, Lavoie recalls, Stephen died in a motorcycle
accident, an event that “changed them all, I think,” she said.
“If Karen had even thought about having a future with a
family, after that, I think she really wanted to take care of her
mom and dad.” Dominic died in 1996. About a decade later,
Karen inherited her grandmother's home on Terra Noble Way.
A few years later, in 2010, Adele married Tony in a City Hall
ceremony, and Adele moved into Tony's place, a cream-
colored house with a garden of basil and tomato plants.

When Tony bought his house in the late 1960s, Berryessa,

abutting the Diablo Range foothills, was a new, sparse
neighborhood of mostly one-story homes with small front
yards. Over the years, most of the original buyers sold to
people attracted to the competitive schools and tech industry
jobs. The Aiellos were living in Silicon Valley, but Adele said
she only knew a little about computers and Tony said he knew
“zero.” A four-bedroom ranch house that was once a first step
into the middle class sells for more than $1 million.
Neighborhood Watch signs in windows, porch cameras, and
security signs speared into green lawns suggest an air of
distrust around Berryessa's manicured edges. Remaining old-
timers say they don't really know the younger set, and one
neighbor complains of the commuter hive's lack of neighborly
graces: “They come in, shut their garage door, and go in their
house.”
According to Adele, Karen used to say she was “the loner of
the family,” her life revolving around work and home, where
she cared for her cats and grew roses in her yard. As far as
Adele knew, her daughter hadn't seen anyone romantically in
years. (And, it seemed, contentedly so: A coworker once heard
Karen say, “Thank God I'm single. I don't have to deal with all
those problems.") Karen and Adele talked on the phone every
couple of weeks, and Adele kept a spare set of keys to her
daughter's house.

Karen, who was 5'5" and about 170 pounds, seemed physically
strong to her mother. She did a lot of walking on the job,
pushing medicine-dispensing machines across the sprawling
hospital where she'd worked for more than 40 years. She'd
recently started wearing a Fitbit to track her steps. Adele
described her as caring, taking shifts for coworkers who had
family commitments. When an old acquaintance ran into her at
CVS, she noticed that Karen was still wearing her ponytail,
now graying, and was as gentle and pleasant as ever.

A few months before her death, Karen told her mother that she
saw a man watching her from across the street and worried
that he might be spying. After that, she started driving straight
into her garage and sealing the door behind her. Around the
time authorities believe Karen was murdered, at least two
neighbors say they heard screams, possibly a cry of “Let go of
me!” Neither neighbor called the police.
ILLUSTRATION: LELAND FOSTER

When the coroner's investigator broke the news of Karen's

death to Adele and Tony, she held back the gruesome details,
telling the couple Karen had suffered head injuries that they
were still looking into. Later, she noted to the police that
while Adele, seated at the kitchen table, seemed in shock,
Tony walked in and out of the room and fetched Adele a
tissue.
Shortly after the investigator left, Tony headed to Karen’s
house, where the police were still combing through evidence.
Seeing an officer standing guard outside, Tony asked if he
could collect Karen’s mail. Tony called Karen “an angel” and
asked the officer, “Why would someone do something like
this?”

When two police detectives arrived at the Aiellos' house later

that afternoon to interview the couple, Tony opened the
drapes and saluted them from inside the window with a wide
grin. As he opened the door, they asked how he was doing,
and he responded, “Oh, not bad for a young kid.” Seated at the
kitchen table, Adele was alert and pressed the detectives to
do all they could.

Tony told the detectives how he'd brought Karen pizza and
biscotti on Saturday, and that Karen said she was going to
have a get-together with friends. Adele pushed him to be more
specific:

“Sweetheart, did she say ‘friends’ or ‘friend’?” she asked.

“I—I really can't pin that down,” Tony replied.

Tony also mentioned a potential lead: A few hours after he

dropped off the pizza, he said, he was outside and, hearing a
honk, glanced up to glimpse what looked like Karen's white
car passing by. Someone was in the passenger seat. Tony had
mentioned this drive-by to others that day, the exact details
seeming to change each time, but all versions included the
unknown passenger.
With Tony's story in mind, officers scanned nearby houses for
cameras that would have been on the path of Karen's
purported drive. They found one, but after reviewing its
archive from late that afternoon for a car like Karen's, the
cops came up empty. Footage from a Ring security camera
kitty-corner from Karen's home, however, had captured
images of a car in Karen's driveway like the Toyota that Tony
drove. The camera recorded only snippets of footage when
triggered by movement, but the images showed the car parked
at 3:12 pm, still there at 3:33, and then gone by the time the
next image was taken at 3:35. The video never showed the
driver.

That timeline would later become crucial. On September 19,

Fitbit's director of brand protection, Jeff Bonham, stopped by
San Jose police headquarters to collect Karen's smartwatch.
He reported back to police the next day that Karen's device
had been syncing via Bluetooth every 15 minutes with its
paired device. An initial analysis showed that she didn't take
any steps after 3:13 pm. The data recorded her heart rate
accelerating around 3:20 pm, then taking a “precipitous drop”
and ceasing altogether by 3:28. The device did not capture
any more motion activity until Karen's body was taken to the
morgue. The prosecution would later allege that she was
“brutally murdered in her own home while eating her last
meal.” Investigators had found pieces of pizza at her feet.

On September 25, the police called Tony and asked to meet

him at Karen's house, according to Tony's defense team. When
Tony drove over, a swarm of armed police jumped from
unmarked cars. One neighbor, peering out the window, heard
them yell, “Put your hands up, dammit!” Tony was arrested in
Karen's driveway.

At a San Jose police station, Tony was hauled into a homicide

interrogation room. “What the hell am I doing here?” he asked
detectives Brian Meeker and Mike Montonye. Then he waived
his right to remain silent and amiably rattled off his life history
and answered questions about Karen, until one detective
abruptly shifted the subject: Did Tony know what a Fitbit was?
He shook his head. They told him that it was a watch with a
step counter built into it. “Oh, nice,” Tony marveled, not
seeing where the questioning was going. It also has a heart
rate monitor, they said. “Oh, that's better yet.”

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The detectives continued: The data shows that Karen's heart
stopped at 3:28 pm, they told Tony. What's more, they knew
Tony was there at the time.

“Oh, no,” Tony said. “She was alive when I left.”

Meeker and Montonye kept Tony in the room for more than six
hours, going over every aspect of the pizza visit again and
again, while Tony, in his jovial manner, kept calling each of
the cops “my friend.” One grew exasperated and said, “Tony,
let's get this straight. You keep calling me ‘my friend.’ We're
not friends at this point, because I'm accusing you of murder.”

At another point: “I think you caved her head in. I do. I think
you did some really evil stuff.”

Tony's response: “Not this kid. Not this kid … I'm a lovable
man, family man.”
Getting nowhere, the cops started prodding at a motive.
Maybe it was money? “That's one thing we don't need,” Tony
said, with a laugh.

“Were you trying to come on to her?”

“Nev—. Oh God, yeah, right,” he said. “No way. There's nothing

… like that. I'm a happy man, a very happy man in many ways.”

“Not this kid. Not this kid. … I'm a lovable man,

family man.”
Tony offered that maybe someone else was hiding in the
house; he asked whether they'd found biscotti—that maybe
that could lead to the culprit. “Knowing that your daughter
was killed,” one detective replied, “is it reasonable to ask me
about a bag of frickin' cookies?”

“Well, they will be in evidence if somebody grab it and take it,”

Tony answered.

“So the Cookie Monster did it. Is that it?”

Several times the cops left the room, but the cameras kept
rolling. Alone, but aware he was still being recorded, Tony
became antsy. "He looked like Jack LaLanne,” detective Brian
Meeker would later tell a grand jury. “He was in there doing
stretching and calisthenics and moving around, walking
consistently, raising his arms above his head, stretching and
twisting." He also muttered soliloquies: “I got blamed for
something I didn't do. How did that happen? I have no idea. I
didn't do it. I didn't do it. I did not do it … Yeah, you're done …
Screwed up. No, he's convinced. Yep, the county jail … Lost
the house. Tony Aiello in jail, wow. You're stupid. Idiot.”
During another break: “That's my baby, my baby, my adopted
daughter … Who in the hell would have done that?” Yet
another break: “Never see the daylight again. I didn't do it …
Who in the hell was in the house? Hiding.”

At one point, the cops returned and told Tony that other
investigators were rifling through his house at that very
moment, and they'd found the same brand of knife that was in
Karen's hand at the murder scene. Tony explained he'd been a
butcher. Even more concerning, the detectives went on, were
the traces of blood they found on shirts in his hamper. “Is that
going to be Karen's blood?” a detective asked.

“Nope. I don't think so.”

One of the detectives fixated on his choice of words: “That's

an interesting thing to say: ‘I don't think so’ versus ‘Hell no.’ ”
Tony offered that maybe he shook his hands when bleeding.

“Tony, there's a crapload of stuff that you can't explain,” the

detective told him. “And if you can't explain it, I have to use
science to explain it.”

In 2009, Fitbit released its first personal tracking device. It

clipped onto clothes and contained sensors to measure
changes in speed and direction, using algorithms to make
sense of that data. The company grew and improved its
technology, releasing a model that synced with an iPhone app
in 2011, then wrist-worn trackers in 2013. Today, some 27
million people use the company's devices to see how far
they've run or climbed, how many steps they've taken or hours
they've slept or calories they've burned. An explosion of
competitors have entered the market in the past five years,
most notably the Apple Watch in 2015. That has hurt Fitbit's
business, but the number of people tracking themselves on
one wearable device or another is only growing; some 170
million wearables were shipped last year worldwide.

As more people used the devices, it was inevitable that they

would be worn by victims or suspects in crimes and
potentially hold tantalizing clues or even plausible answers:
Does a suspect's alibi of being at home asleep hold up? Does a
victim's steady heart rate at the time of an alleged attack
suggest the charge was fabricated?

Using trackers this way, of course, assumes that the devices

are accurate—and not just accurate on average, but at very
specific moments in time, a sort of black box for the body that
reveals physiological truths that its wearer might prefer to
conceal. Research on fitness trackers, however, shows they
don't always perfectly mirror reality. An analysis of 67 studies
on Fitbit's movement tracking concluded that the device
worked best on able-bodied adults walking at typical speeds.
Even then, the devices weren't perfect—they got within 10
percent of the actual number of steps a person took half of the
time—and became even less accurate in counting steps when
someone was resting their wrist on a walker or stroller, for
example. “It's not measuring actual behavior,” says Lynne
Feehan, a clinical associate professor at the University of
British Columbia and the lead researcher on the paper. “It's
interpreting motion.”

Many fitness tracker users experience moments of

misinterpretation: the piano playing session that was
categorized as cycling; the times during sweaty exercise
when it stops picking up a heart rate. Even Fitbit's own terms
of service point out that it is a consumer product with
accuracy that is “not intended to match that of medical
devices or scientific measurement devices.”

Smartwatches decipher heart rate using green LEDs that

beam hundreds of times per second into capillaries through
the skin. Those capillaries allow in more of the light when full
of blood, and less between beats, and the device measures
how much light is absorbed. That measurement is then
siphoned through a proprietary algorithm to generate a heart
rate figure. University of Wisconsin researchers looked at how
well wrist-worn fitness trackers measured heart rate,
comparing it to an electrocardiograph, the gold standard for
heart monitoring. They found that the fitness trackers' heart
rate deviated more from the actual rate when a subject
exercised on a treadmill than when at rest. (Fitbit won't talk
specifics about its accuracy, saying in a statement, “We are
confident in the performance of all our devices” and that the
company continues to test them.)

“Nobody has come out and said these are extremely

accurate,” says Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, one of the researchers
on the heart rate study. Still, such variations from real
measurements don't matter much for its typical use. “Are
fitness trackers in general accurate enough that I think they
provide valuable information to be useful for the typical
American consumer? Yes. I think so.” With smartwatch heart
trackers, “if you're trying to determine if someone's heart rate
is exactly 80 beats versus 90 beats per minute, that's a really
hard thing,” Cadmus-Bertram says. “If you're trying to
determine if a heartbeat has ended, in my experience with
these devices, they should be able to do that quite easily.”
Evidence from fitness trackers has been admitted in homicide
cases in the UK and Germany. In the US, one of the first
known criminal cases involving a wearable took a surprising
twist because of the data it revealed. In 2015 a woman in
Pennsylvania claimed that an intruder had dragged her out of
bed and into a bathroom and raped her with a bottle at
knifepoint. She gave investigators permission to access her
Fitbit data, which then contradicted her claim; the data
showed she had been walking around all night prior to calling
the police, not sleeping. “I think it's safe to say the Fitbit
evidence really sealed it for us,” says Brett Hambright of the
Lancaster County District Attorney's Office. “It presented a
direct contradiction to what she claimed happened.” The
woman was charged with filing a fictitious report, and she
didn't fight the charges.

So far, just a few judges have issued rulings that discuss in

detail how to handle evidence from fitness trackers. In a 2016
Wisconsin case, Fitbit data was used to eliminate the
possibility that a woman was murdered by her live-in
boyfriend. The judge ruled that an affidavit from Fitbit
established the device's authenticity and allowed lawyers to
introduce its step-counting data; at trial, a sheriff's
department analyst vouched for the reliability of the man's
particular device. However, the judge barred the Fitbit's sleep
data, citing a class-action suit that claims the sleep tracking
could be off by as much as 45 minutes. (The murder case is
now being appealed.)

The WIRED Guide to Personal Data

How other judges decide the validity of Fitbit information will
likely continue to be decided in the slow burn of the legal
system, and no appellate court has yet weighed in. Antigone
Peyton, an intellectual property and technology law attorney
who has used data from wearables in civil cases, points out
that there are still no set legal standards for how and when
this new type of data should be admitted. Forensic tools like
bullet lead analysis and polygraph tests were once widely
accepted in court, she notes, but were later dismissed as
“wildly inaccurate.” People often have a sense that “data is
equivalent to truth,” she says. But there are “many ways the
information on these devices can be interpreted.”

Gail Gottehrer, an attorney who specializes in tech litigation

and lectures at Columbia University, thinks that judges should
permit jurors to weigh new types of tech evidence with
guidance from expert witnesses. The thing jurors need to
know, she says, is that “this isn't like saving a Word document
and printing it out. This isn't just maintenance of data;
something's being done to this data. The algorithm is drawing
conclusions.” And the jurors can decide how much weight to
give the results.

Digital data has long been fair game. But now, Gottehrer says,
“it's something you're wearing on your wrist, essentially
showing the most personal information about you.” While you
have the right to remain silent, your gadgets mostly do not.
Still, last year, the Supreme Court ruled that people have a
legitimate expectation of privacy for their phone location
data, and that to protect Fourth Amendment rights against
unreasonable search and seizure, police must have a warrant
to search that data. While other makers of smart devices have
waged high-profile fights over those orders—Amazon resisted
turning over a murder suspect's Echo recordings until the
suspect himself ended the face-off by consenting—some
wearable companies seem to be cooperating.

In Tony Aiello's case, the Fitbit data came from the victim and
not the accused. But police got a warrant—which is required
for digital evidence under California law—for Karen's Fitbit
data.

Tony's defense lawyers signaled that they would attack the

reliability of the Fitbit data. They assembled a grab bag of
disqualifications: They said Karen wore the device for only
two weeks or less, and it hadn't yet normalized to her signal;
they said that Fitbit, which assigns a confidence score of 0 to
3 to its data collection, at times assigns zero confidence to
the data on Karen's device on the day the prosecution says
she was murdered; and Edward Caden, one of the defense
attorneys, said that what the prosecution calls a “spike” in
Karen's heart rate is more like “a pimple.” Caden even
asserted that there were moments after 3:28 pm when Karen's
Fitbit seems to still report heartbeat data.

Angela Bernhard, the chief trial deputy for Santa Clara County,
told me in August that she expected that the defense would
“be fighting to keep out a lot of the evidence that we want in”
and that she intended to present the Fitbit evidence at trial.
“Ultimately it's up to the judge what evidence gets brought in
and what doesn't,” she said. At a grand jury hearing in August,
Bonham, the Fitbit executive, testified that Fitbit had turned
over a voluminous Excel spreadsheet of Karen’s raw heartbeat
and step data. He also clarified that a confidence rating of
zero means the device isn't registering a heartbeat at all, and
detectives say that Karen's device showed no heartbeat and
zero confidence at 3:28 pm and after. Detective Meeker
testified to the reliability of Karen’s device specifically: At two
times in early September that Karen was visible on
surveillance footage walking in stores, her Fitbit recorded
movement. (Fitbit declined to comment on Aiello's case.)

In the meantime, as the internet of things keeps expanding—

porch cameras aimed out into the street to catch passing
cars, cell phones tracking us pretty much always, virtual
assistants listening in—criminals are going to have to become
more tech-savvy or find another trade. And we all should
realize there is little we can hide.

The damning timeline created by the Fitbit data, paired with

the Ring footage, allowed the police to get an arrest warrant
for Tony. They also got a warrant to search his home, where
they seized the blood-spotted clothing in the hamper and
detected blood residue in the sinks. In addition, they found a
Columbia-brand camouflage jacket with blood spatter on the
sleeves. They sent the items to the county crime lab for DNA
testing.

Within days of Tony's arrest, the family hired an attorney,

Steven Nakano, who arranged for Tony to take a polygraph
test. He passed. Nakano also latched onto another piece of
evidence: a flattened cigarette that was found in Karen's
kitchen. Neither Tony nor Karen smoked. An initial DNA test
showed the genetic markers of an Asian man. Victoria
Robinson, the Santa Clara County prosecutor, said that the
cigarette had been “placed atop one of the numerous blood
spatters,” suggesting it could have been planted.

But as test results came back, the evidence started to look

bad for Tony. The blood on the camouflage jacket matched
Karen's. The prosecution no longer had to rely only on the
timeline woven from Fitbit and Ring data. The reliability of
genetic testing, unlike data from wearables, has been
established both scientifically and in criminal trials. (Even
Nakano told me the blood is “hard to explain.”)

By March, after Tony had been in jail for more than five
months, the family brought on a new legal team—Caden, who
is a former prison warden, and a veteran defense attorney
named Brian Getz. The pair recruited a retired
neuropsychologist who had spent a career in California's
prison system. She interviewed Tony for 75 minutes and noted
his short-term memory problems. His affability, honed during
years in customer service, made him “likely to appear much
more capable than he actually is,” she wrote, raising a serious
question as to “how it would have been even remotely
possible” for him to strategize and cover up a murder—“were
it even physically possible for him to achieve this in the first
place.”

As for the cigarette, Getz says that it may have been part of
the “demented” fakery: “We're not going to run from the idea
that this was a staged murder scene.” But his defense
intended to include an alternative theory, which Caden
described to me: Karen had already been injured—cut—by
someone else, and that person was in her house, hiding, when
Tony arrived with the pizza and biscotti. When Tony hugged
her at the door (“They hug—they're Italians”), the blood got
onto Tony's jacket. Or perhaps it got on Tony from a tissue or
Karen's long ponytail. The prosecution declined to
characterize the amount of blood found on Tony's clothes, but
Caden claims it is “not an amount of blood that would be
consistent with a person who was committing the type of
murder that occurred.”

The defense says it's “very likely” the killer murdered Karen
sometime after Tony left. And central to the defense's
alternative timeline would be attacking the Fitbit data that,
according to the prosecution, showed Karen's heart rate
stopping at 3:28 pm on Saturday afternoon.

Bernhard, the chief trial deputy, would not discuss the case or
the evidence in detail, but she called both the blood and
timeline created by the Fitbit data and the Ring video “very
strong evidence.”

The defense theory involves accepting some fairly bizarre

circumstances—Karen being aware that a violent person was
hiding in her house while she greeted Tony warmly, and Tony
failing to notice, or at least to tell detectives, that Karen was
bleeding. But the defense's greatest asset might be simply the
sheer cognitive dissonance of a 90-year-old man—described as
a “lawn gnome” by his attorney—offering his stepdaughter a
plate of pizza before allegedly bludgeoning her to death, and
then apparently frustrating the detectives grilling him for
hours with denials while calling them “my friend.” The fact
that the prosecution hasn't presented a motive leaves a
nagging loose end. As Adele told the neuropsychologist, “That
kind man wouldn't hurt a flea.”
ILLUSTRATION: LELAND FOSTER
In his 92nd year, Tony Aiello heaved out of a hard bed each
morning in the Santa Clara County jail. He no longer had his
sock pullers or his velcro shoes. He took insulin shots for the
diabetes he'd controlled with diet at home, and he'd been
transferred to the hospital several times as his breathing and
heart function worsened. Fellow inmates helped him dress,
shave, and make his bed. When he spoke with his attorney in
jail, he was put in leg irons, handcuffs, and waist chains
fastened to an eyebolt in the concrete floor. Said Getz: “I'm
terrified he's going to die.”

In May, Tony was again wheeled into court, this time to see if
he could get out on bail and await his hearings at home. That
would be a rare privilege for a homicide defendant, and Santa
Clara County is a tough-on-crime part of the Bay Area. The
court's evaluators recommended against release. Since his
hearing in January, Tony had lost his mischievous pluck. He
didn't lift his cuffed hands to twiddle his thumbs in his family's
direction. This time he sat silently, his mouth set in a cod-like
frown.
His wife and daughter sat in the gallery. The months of Tony's
incarceration seemed to have taken a toll on them too. His
daughter walked with a cane. Adele was accompanied by a
helper. Back at home, Tony would drive her around, buy
groceries, and cook, and in his absence people had noticed
she'd lost weight.

After the defense emphasized Tony's frailty, it was the

prosecution's time to respond: “This is a murder case,”
Victoria Robinson said emphatically. “This is a brutal murder
case. This is a person who has gone to extreme lengths to
avoid culpability—from lying to investigators to fabricating
stories to throw them off to tampering with the crime scene
and, very ineffectually, changing a crime scene.” She then
dropped a bombshell: Two people had come to the police
claiming Tony had sexually assaulted them when they were
children, in the 1950s. As she spoke, the Aiellos remained
stoic. Annette later brushed off the allegations as a “ploy”
with “no validity.”

Judge Edward Lee, a gaunt former cop and prosecutor, told

the room he didn't need to hear more about the decades-old
allegations or see crime scene evidence to make a decision. “I
believe that there is clear and convincing evidence there
would be a serious risk to other people in the community,” he
ruled. Tony was staying in jail. When the judge asked Adele if
she’d come back to testify at a later hearing, she replied,
weakly, “Of course.” Later, Annette said her father had
remained hopeful of getting out: “He believes justice will set
him free.”

In June, Tony entered the hospital again for heart failure. This
time he stayed for more than five weeks and signed a do-not-
resuscitate order. At the end of August, after being indicted by
the grand jury, Tony was shuttled to the hospital for the last
time. A sheriff’s deputy was posted outside, and sometimes
inside, the room. At points, Adele and Annette visited him as
he faded, Getz said. At approximately 6:12 pm on September
10, while Annette and doctors were present, Tony died.

Having no other suspects, the prosecutor intended to dismiss

the case, leaving the open matter of Tony’s guilt or innocence
and the validity of smartwatch evidence to loom, unresolved
for all involved. Until the end, Tony maintained his innocence,
his attorneys say. Meanwhile, “We will never know what really
happened to Karen,” says her old friend, Therese Lavoie. “That
will bother me the rest of my life.”

Five miles from the courthouse, across from an AutoZone and

another San Jose strip mall, stands a Tudor-style cottage. It's
the chapel at the entrance to Oak Hill Memorial Park, the
oldest secular cemetery in California. The interred include a
rider for the Pony Express and several members of the
pioneering Donner Party who survived a snowbound winter in
the Sierra Nevada during the push west. Past the cottage, way
out into the rows of tombstones, is a coffin-sized rectangle of
fresh grass, which was several shades darker than the
surrounding lawn this past spring. The simple white marker,
flush with the earth, reads KAREN L. NAVARRA, 1950–2018.
Directly to its left stands a granite headstone inscribed with
three roses and a bow. On one panel is inscribed her father's
name, Dominic Navarra, 1923–1996. The spousal panel
remains blank.

Adele had been angry since Tony was arrested. She believed
that the prosecutor wanted Tony to die in jail before he could
clear his name. While Tony was there, Adele still answered his
daily jail calls. She said she’d do anything it took to have him
back at home. Before getting wheeled out of the courtroom to
go back to jail in May, Tony blew Adele a mournful kiss.